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Our mortgage is $2600 month. My wife has a much better paying job than me. I make $2200 a month after taxes/deductions. She is currently going through cancer treatments and although everything is looking positive it really got me thinking about what the hell does life look like for my family if something happens to my wife?
I've had the same bus driving job for 23 years. I'm undereducated. A 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment is $1600 month here. I don't know how I'd ever be able to take care of myself and two kids.
They want us to have 80k+ in school debt so you can be allowed to have mortgage debt or rent and own nothing. I don't know where I'm going with this but I'm just bummed out about life right now.
That's what life insurance polices are for. Will be pretty hard to get one with her cancer diagnosis though.
Are you not required to have a joint life assurance policy as a condition of a mortgage in the US?
lol no, the bank doesn’t care, they’ll just take your house if you can’t pay
You literally beat me to this reply by like 4 minutes haha. Banks were giving variable mortgages to people who could barely afford current rates, they don't give a shit.
I would never ever take an adjustable rate mortgage. That is just begging to get fucked. Like right now for example. My mortgage is like 4.2% but if it were an adjustable id be at like 6+% and be out of a house.
Sure, but the main reason they didn't care is because they were immediately selling the debt to a pension fund.
When the owner defaults, the bank doesn't even own it anymore, and someone else finds their pension is suddenly underfunded.
Or when the housing market is booming, they'll repossess the house and sell it again for even more of a profit.
Probably make as much use of the scam mortgage insurance that they can too. I forget what it's actually called but it's a scam IMO. $100 a month baked into my escrow for insurance to the lender in case I lost the house. To my knowledge it provides me no benefit.
Upside is when I refinanced it was taken off. (Think the whole first time home owner program requires it for the initial loan.)
Not anywhere that I've seen, just home owners insurance and mortgage insurance if you pay less than 20% down.
Nope, at least not for my mortgage. The only thing that was required was a home owners insurance policy.
I bought last year and there was nothing in the process that wanted either of us to have life insurance.
In the US they want you to default. They can flip the house for more than you owe them.
Lmao, what? You really think that?
Love how everyone in this subthread are sure they all live in the same country with the same rules and same banking system.
Globalization and capitalism babyy
Not a fan of the latter but that's life ☹️
I'm in exactly the same boat as you. Undereducated, lower paying job than my wife, mortgage, etc. I've frequently had panicked thoughts about what I would do if she died. And we have a kid, which makes it even worse.
I was never really scared of much until I had a kid.
Consider term life insurance? (Not whole life which is a ripoff.) It's usually pretty cheap for a 20 year policy that'll give you a few hundred grand if the worst happens. Like literally $20-$50/month. I'm not a salesman, don't work in insurance, just a suggestion.
Probably too late now she's already in cancer treatment
Yeah, if you’re in your 20s and reading this, and your healthy, get term life insurance now. Get it while it’s go out to dinner cheap. I’m 43 on medication due to congenital issues and mine is $350 PER MONTH!
Flying squids family seems to be OK, that user was responding to the guy with cancer wife. Not too late for them I don't think.
Part of the reason my partner and I don't want kids. It's almost impossible to raise them alone and she has a preexisting condition that she wouldn't want to pass on to them. If she passes away I could always just go live in my car by the beach and be fine. Wouldn't be able to do that very well with a kid.
You need to move to someplace you can afford.
The OP is another example... You can live alone in many places, but they chose to live in an expensive area. You can't complain about that and be taken seriously. I want to live in Beverly hills... but I can't afford it, so I don't live there.
This is such a bullshit take. I'm not even going to address why because you already know. Yes, I'm sure the place they're talking about with $1600/month rent is fucking Beverly Hills, you jackass. Lmfao
I was just thinking this. I spend $1300 a month on rent and it's so fuckin run down and dumpy. If Beverly hills only cost me $300 more a month, I'd find a way to pay the difference and make it work. But Beverly hills isn't that cheap. Because everything, even garbage apartments, are stupid expensive now.
Dude, $5000+/month - 5 figures / month mortgage payments, easy in Beverley Hills.
Here in southern california, $1300 a month would get you....a bus ticket out of town.
Right
This was 3 years ago and it's only gotten worse
OP's Mortgage: $2600/month
You: "I want to live in Beverly hills... but I can't afford it, so I don't live there."
Out of touch with reality? Check.
What really blows is when I bought my house 8 years ago, it was affordable. I now make almost 40% more and there is no way I could afford the same house. Mortgage, taxes and insurance (including flood insurance because the NFIP sucks) is less than $1,400. Once PMI is removed, it will be closer to 1,300, and once we finally remove flood insurance (because we are inland and the maps are outdated) it will be less than $1,100 a month.
I just don't see how millennials find homes anywhere remotely desirable in this market.
Even back at the end of 2019, we managed to find a house in a decent area that we could afford on my $60K/yr job. The mortgage was only $100 more a month than we were paying for a TINY “2” bedroom apartment. We managed to use our state’s first time homebuyer program to get a grant to pay to remove the PMI up front, which was a big help. I now make more money but I really think we couldn’t afford our house now (at least at the price online website estimate). It’s crazy and we never want to move if we can avoid it!
I have a "starter house" but in a very desirable town, it's possible it might make someone more money to tear down and build a mcmansion. We will probably want to move, which is fine because bigger houses aren't that much more expensive. Once the mcmansions hit the market during the lull, they never went away. It's just no one is willing to pay 650k+ for them. So now they are in the 450k range, it has driven down the price of reasonably large and or older big farm style homes down. So now my 170k property is worth like almost 250k and the house that would have been 400k, is around 325 to 350. Those two events basically closed the gap significantly.
My daughter is only 13 but we're already expecting she's going to spend her 20s with us because of this.
Try 30s
I just don’t see how millennials find homes anywhere remotely desirable in this market.
It's a strange market to be sure, but one way or another I think it'll end. Either mortgage rates go way, way down, or prices, or both in the medium to long term.
Easy. We don't.
A $2600/month mortgage is like a half million dollar house dude
They should absolutely move if the wife has cancer.
A $2600/month mortgage is like a half million dollar house dude
Umm...try looking up what $400,000 worth of debt will cost you monthly today (and what your existing equity plus debt and on-hand cash will even buy you in today's market).
I wouldn't move in this market at all if you can make your mortgage payments.
$400,000 will buy you a mansion where I live. My house is worth about half that, and it's quite nice.
👏 👏
Just simply be like this random dude on the Internet...live in his neighborhood and emulate his daily commute...he's the finest, most shining example.
Feeling down? Wife got cancer? Relocated from your entire friends, family, and your job? No worries, you'll have SCB from the Internet to keep you company.
Grow up bud. You’re not contributing anything meaningful to the conversation
Lol
Or just move literally anywhere in the Midwest with the equity from your half-million dollar home, and buy one for 150k, and get your wife treatment.
You can't possibly be this dumb, so I'm going to assume you had a bad day at work today. Hope it gets better.
Uselessly being a dick isn't going to make it better. Call a friend.
LOL. I'm having a lot of fun actually.
You're like a parody of all of the bad advice I've gotten in my life, and all of the worst of the fortune/CNN money/bloomberg clickbait non-sense that I've read over the years.
You can’t possibly be this dumb
Haha I said literally that exact same thing to this asshole the other day word for word! Or maybe it was another moronic asshole on lemmy, there's tons here and it's hard to tell them all apart. But this guy is definitely a particularly bad and aggressive flavor of stupid for sure.
A 2000 sq ft 3 bed 2 bath in a good neighborhood goes for about that where I live, which is known to be in the lower CoL part of the country. The reason shit is so fucked up is that our overlords at huge mutual funds like Blackrock have bought up all the houses so that they can rent them to serfs and collect perpetual income for almost no risk.
known to be in the lower CoL part of the country
Lol no it is not. I'm not sure why you'd want to pretend it is.
I actually live in a moderate CoL area and am a homeowner. I could sell my house right now and buy a house not 20 miles away for about half what my current house is worth, which is also not half a million fucking dollars.
Do you know how insane this sounds to someone from "flyover country?"
There's an entire neighborhood going up near me in the 200s. Amazing school system, right outside the city, easy access to parks/lakes/what have you.
the reason is Blackrock
Lol no it is not. It is because we restrict what housing can be built where and thus have insufficient housing.
Maybe in the boonies but my point is Beverly Hills is not a $2600/month zone and what OP is paying is not unusual.
Where should they move to that houses are less than half a million dollars these days, inner city Detroit?
Last i checked my house is worth $176
Or, God forbid, outside of a major city.
My house is worth mid-200s (now, purchased for 140 about 8 years ago), in a very nice neighborhood. I have a pool, a literal white picket fence, and half an acre of property. My house is among the more expensive areas where I live.
There's an entire fucking country away from the coast buddy. Check it out. Or don't, and only move here when the breadwinner of your family has a potentially-fatal illness and you need to live somewhere less expensive that also has top-tier medical care nearby, which is what I suggested to OP.
I live in Indiana. Nice try though.
Cool. Here's a 3 bed 4 bath, extremely nice house for 350, inside Indianapolis. It was literally the first listing on Zillow. Let me know if you want me to pull up something cheaper.
I live in Ohio. Our markets aren't that different . Now imagine you didn't live in the largest city in Indiana.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/8024-Milender-Blvd-Indianapolis-IN-46237/308925348_zpid/
Oh, sorry, more than 3/4 million. That's definitely totally affordable for someone moving into a new area with no job lined up.
350k is not 3/4 of a million dollars. It's barely over 1/4 of a million dollars. You also don't have to live inside Indianapolis, because that jacks up prices.
Thinking isn't hard man.
But if that's not good enough here's 3br 1bath also inside Indianapolis for 100k cheaper
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Indianapolis-IN-46219/1219903_zpid/
There’s an entire fucking country away from the coast buddy. Check it out.
I drove across the entirety of it multiple times, most people fly over it for a reason.
Fuck You, and fuck that entire concept
No. No you can't. There's only a few bajillion articles since COVID about the unaffordability of housing in all 50 states.
It's weird that I see houses for sale all over the US in literally every possible price bracket and you don't.
You are a shit human.
Says the shitbag
Everyone's saying it!
112 downvotes goddamn. Lemmings are so much more savage than redditors, i swear to god.
I agree a lot of people are going to need to reevaluate their lifestyle and geography settings in the coming decades. Like mass migration level stuff. It sucks and nobody wants to hear it but that's where we are headed.
There is nowhere that is affordable unless you have a well paying work from home job and you can get a big city salary in a small town. Cheap places have cheap jobs.
Lol that is an outright lie. There are so many places you can live affordably in the US... but people think they need to live in Manhattan and shit
Cheap places have cheap jobs. It's econ 101. Wages and prices will reach a similar equilibrium everywhere, though obviously there will be a few statistical outliers in both directions, in most cases given free movement of people, housing will cost the same relative to local salaries.
Remote work is the only thing shaking up this equation.
Haha yeah it's the antiwork crowd that mostly moved. The ones who blame thier problems on everyone else and refuse to look internally as to what the problem might be and then wonder why nothing ever changes.
What gets me is the rabid hatred for any and all things finance/accounting/economics/business etc. These people have never looked at a balance sheet in their lives and don't have a clue about anything technical in these fields. And yet they have extremely strong opinions about technical shit they don't understand, and express these opinions for loudly and confidently. Drives me crazy.
I want to live in Beverly hills… but I can’t afford it, so I don’t live there.
I want to live in Atlantis, but I don't own a submarine, it's fictional, and the Atlantis council simply does not prioritize affordable housing,
Lmao, my PITI is 3300/month and I live in a 1000sqft rambler that’s in ok shape in the first city that’s considered affordable outside of the Seattle region. All my job prospects are here or in similar markets, and rent for something comparable isn’t far behind what I’m paying (was paying $3k/month for a 2 bed apartment before buying last year) for my house.
Are there cheaper markets? Yea. Are there jobs for me in those markets? Lmao, no.
There's a reason high paying jobs have to be high paying. It's really tied to the local rent.
The only issue is a lot of those careers still put people through some underpaid grunt or trainee role before they can earn a living wage...
Not sure why everyone is downvoting you. Rural areas are significantly cheaper, assuming you can find a job there. I say this as someone who just built a house in rural Oregon 45 mins outside of PDX
Plus you can help do your part by turning their shitty little red county purple.
The fuck?
This is good option if you can work online. If everyone moves out from cities to countryside the market would stabilize or collapse, meanwhile the countryside would improve and have more amenities, that require more jobs there and other people can move in. It would be hard in the beginning...
PS: I imagine there are no such problems in the countryside yet
I personally just drive 25 minutes to work because I don't have any skills that allow me to work from home.